Photo: The new Pokapu Road bridge in Northland.
Potholed roads, leaking pipes, and an electrical grid under strain. New Zealand’s aging infrastructure has been a regular fixture in the media in recent months, not to mention on community Facebook pages where councils and contractors often cop their share of flak. By Damian Pedreschi, Ventia Executive General Manager New Zealand.
It would be nice to put it all down to media hyperbole, but the first step in solving a problem is acknowledging the problem; so, it’s time for our country to face the facts.
The truth is that for decades now, our infrastructure hasn’t been designed or managed as well as it could have been. This is a historic and systemic problem with the way many infrastructure projects are planned, set up and funded.
In my work at Ventia, I’m fortunate to learn a lot more about infrastructure assets on both sides of the Tasman; from roading, water and electricity projects to work on telecommunications assets, ports, defence bases, airports and community amenities like parks and playgrounds.
There are many examples of asset owners achieving exceptional results for their communities, but also times when better planning and changes in approach could have improved the quality, cost, and performance outcomes over time. Often the difference comes down to consultation – not only with the community, but also with those involved in building, maintaining and operating an asset for the entirety of its useful life.
Infrastructure assets are usually designed to last decades so it makes sense to future proof them and consider costs that will accrue well beyond their initial construction.
Doing this is much easier if the parties undertaking the building, asset management, and maintenance work are engaged to provide input early on – ideally right at the start – before the business case and designs for the asset are finalised.
With up to 80 percent of an infrastructure asset’s performance and whole-of-life cost determined during the business case and design, it is imperative we do better in these phases to deliver more efficient and robust infrastructure and save millions of dollars, all while achieving vastly improved performance and safety outcomes.
Here’s a simple example, consider a road or rail bridge. If you don’t think about how workers can safely access and carry out repairs on it in future, the costs of maintenance rise and the traffic or freight disruption caused by the work can significantly increase.
More early engagement is a real opportunity because it’s not yet the dominant practice here. This differs from Australia, where it is becoming far more common to engage operations and maintenance providers, right at the conception of national and state infrastructure projects.
Examples that come to mind are the North East Link transport project in Melbourne and Western Harbour Tunnel in Sydney, where Ventia was engaged as the asset manager before the contracts were awarded to build them.
This input has led to a huge range of small but important design changes before construction begins, ranging from the inclusion of more built-in ladders and walkways, providing easy maintenance access, to overhead services, through to proposed amendments to the surface coating on steelwork to extend design life.
If we had been brought into the process after designs had been finalised or the construction contracts had already been awarded, the opportunity for these value-add improvements would have been lost.
More widespread use of whole-of-life modelling and building information modelling (BIM) is another area that holds promise for improving the way we design and allocate budget for infrastructure.
In roading we’ve modelled the lifespan of different paving materials in different conditions for years, but only recently has the approach become more widespread for other roading assets and infrastructure types.
It was a proud moment earlier this year when Ventia became one of the first infrastructure companies to launch an advanced whole-of-life asset modelling system. This system makes use of the vast amount of data we have from all our infrastructure projects on both sides of the Tasman to model how different construction materials will perform, and how long they will last, in different environments and under different use scenarios.
The whole-of-life models we share with customers now take into account historic failure rates for various materials in a huge number of different settings. This enables planners to make more informed decisions about what materials should be used in an asset’s construction, how much money to budget for maintenance, and importantly – when and where to conduct remediation or maintenance works to prolong an asset’s life and save money in the long run.
BIM and digital twins are also useful in this regard. These technologies are now used on many high-profile national projects, but they can also add value for local government assets. If BIM models capture detailed information about the components used during construction of an asset, where they are installed, and when they were last repaired or maintained, it can save immense time for maintenance providers. This can be passed on to councils and then to their communities in the form of lower rates.
We are not there yet, but the nirvana for our maintenance teams working on council assets would be the ability to combine their BIM data with our own technology to allow workers visiting a site to bring up digital overlay identifying exactly where an asset is and when it was last replaced.
Refining schedule
Improving the way we schedule our maintenance works is one of the easiest wins we can achieve for better whole-of-life asset management.
We all know leaving maintenance and renewal works too long can cause the costs of remediation to rise exponentially. But, doing remediation work too early can also be wasteful if we’re digging up a road or replacing electrical or water infrastructure that still has years of life on the clock.
Allocating budgets to enable interventions and maintenance works at the right times will always be a challenge, but by collaborating with maintenance providers and using whole-of-life asset modelling, customers can gain insights that make maintenance scheduling easier.
Getting the timing right can also result in less disruption.
We all know the impact a rash of road cones can have on local businesses and community stress levels.
Changing procurement
Any discussion of whole-of-life asset management wouldn’t be complete without addressing the country’s procurement practices. It is a complex area, but some easy wins can be made through a more collaborative and flexible approach.
During the tender process, why not share as much information as possible with those bidding on building or maintaining an asset? The more a contractor knows up front, the less risk they have to price in and the lower the whole-of-life cost will be.
Selecting the right contract model is also critical – whether it is Alliancing, Public-private partnership (PPP), traditional public procurement or another model – and when it comes to maintenance contracts, it pays to keep performance measures flexible.
Some maintenance agreements can span many years, or even decades, yet the performance measures and key performance indicators (KPIs) we as contractors are working to are sometimes written into the agreement.
If a measure becomes antiquated due to changes in technology, or if the way an asset is used changes over time, then it is in the interests of all parties to have a contract that allows for amendment of performance measures and KPIs to fit with the new facts on the ground. Allowing for this can be a powerful catalyst for innovation and doing things better.
There’s real hope for the future of our infrastructure because so many of these changes are relatively easy to achieve. It will just take a collaborative and concerted effort, and one that involves contractors and asset management providers working even more closely together for the good of our country in the long-term.